Yikes. I remember reading, a long time ago, that a Google team in manhattan was working on revolutionizing structured information. Anyway, not much to say. I can only hope that they fall asleep and end up behind us all ;) Too much to ask? maybe... Marshall, one small correction: tripple --> triple - Aldo Bucchi from FriendFeed MT Plugin

They could be parsing infoboxes in wikipedia or Freebase data. Would be good to check if that's the case (which is pretty much what Powerset was doing too) - Deepak Singh

mndoci we did check and though in some cases they are doing that, it appears that's not in every case. see the source, for example, on the oregon capital search above - Marshall Kirkpatrick from IM

Oh cool. Missed that part. Hmmm ... Interesting - Deepak Singh

I have not seen this before and it does look like a trial semantic structure. Odd that it isn't leveraging Freebase data. - AJ Kohn

That is pretty huge. And typically the way they do it (silently releasing new features). - Laura Norvig

By the way, the Jesus example supports the semantic structure. Chris Ferguson is well known as Jesus in poker circles. - AJ Kohn

"what is the weather in Brooklyn" vs "brooklyn weather" - guess which query will give you structured results. It's the latter one. I'm not quite sure Google has gone semantic but it has gone structured from time to time. - Allan Benamer from twhirl

I've always felt that semantic web search is a lousy business to be in exactly for this reason. If there's any real value for consumers there (and I guess there is), then why does people think anybody other than Google will own that market just as they own traditional search? Google will be the semantic search engine of the future for 3 reasons: 1) They can: they have the money to build the best semantic search engine in the world. 2) they dominate search: meaning they can test like hell and can hand out semantic results only when needed. 3) this is their core business (and pretty much the only business where they make real money). To beat Google here you don't have to be first mover, you have to have a significant and ownable advantage (algorithm anyone?), and you'd better have one that Google can't match in a number of years, since people won't "get" semantic search in a day, and I won't change my default search engine for a bunch of niche searches. I just don't see any strategic advantage for a new comp - Simone from FriendFeed MT Plugin

A list with the keywords resulting in semantic results would be more than great. - George Tziralis from FriendFeed MT Plugin

That's pretty old, although it has expanded in scope. See http://glinden.blogspot.com/2005... for example - Nick Lothian

This is an interesting development. Recently Google search results also started to display richer information about forum and bulletin board posts. For example: "Weblogs Forum - What about a decorator module version 3.0?" - 5 posts - Last post: Dec 3, 2008 - http://www.artima.com/forums... Does anyone here know when it was introduced and point to more info on how it works? (My guess: it scrapes HTML of forum pages to find semi-structured information about number of posts and their creation date. Unless a forum is already mirrored as a Google Group.) - Uldis Bojars from FriendFeed MT Plugin